Categorically Speaking

Last Sunday I dodged the poop of these guys for a good 20 minutes.

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Questioning Intelligence
The other day I went to the grocery store on my lunch break. Upon exiting the store, I heard the loud incessant barking of what sounded like a rather large dog. As I edged closer to my car, I noticed that the dog is indeed a large dog, barking with his head out the window of a pickup truck that is parked directly in front of my car. No problem, I’m not afraid of dogs, and besides, this one is in a truck… he DOES however have his head the whole way out the passenger side window… and that’s when I noticed the crusty old man standing at the back of the van that’s parked next to the pickup truck. He was refusing to get in his van for fear that the dog would chew his face off. Now, the dog in the truck was pretty close to the driver’s side door of the van, especially with his whole head hanging out the window. And the thing he was barking at was the old man. I was half tempted to walk over to the dog and in my goofiest voice say, “hello puppy, goo goo gaa gaa, here have some of my turkey bagel”, but I figured pregnancy isn’t the time to try and be a dog whisperer. At this point the man was waving someone over to him with this disgusted look on his face. Running through my mind is, “who is going to be able to help this guy but the owner of the dog?” But eureka, it was a policewoman that he was beckoning to. Now I’m thinking, “what the fuck is a police officer going to do? Arrest the dog for barking? Put it down? Wait around and arrest the guy that parked his truck in a grocery store parking lot and was nice enough to leave the window partially down so that his dog didn’t suffocate in the heat?” By this time I’m in the front seat of my car, watching the policewoman talking to this man, and they’re both looking at the dog like it has two heads. Now I’m wondering if either the man or the officer will have enough COMMON SENSE to open the passenger side door of the van, get in, and DRIVE THE FUCK AWAY.

I doubt it.

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Fears
I don’t know if I’ve ever expressed my fear of spiders in the past. Just to bring you up to speed, I’m terrified of them. I have one of the worst phobias when it comes to spiders. People might think its funny or that I’m being dramatic when I freak out when I see a spider, but what they’re really witnessing is immobilizing, mind numbing fear. It’s really NOT funny, and it makes me feel really stupid. So you can imagine my dismay as I was driving home from work last Friday and saw something moving across my dashboard. Glancing down, I saw a huge (when I say huge, I mean probably dime sized, but that’s big enough for me), black, HAIRY spider. Not your garden variety Pennsylvanian car spider. My eyes quickly shot back to the road and I stared ahead as I tried to catch my breath. If you’ve ever had a bee in the car, you probably know the kind of panic you go through, and that’s what I was experiencing, only silently. Silent panic is the worst, because you are literally paralyzed with fear. The spider started moving back toward the passenger side of the dashboard, and seeing it move out of the corner of my eye was making me practically hyperventilate. Anytime I encounter spiders I get the creepy crawlies. You know, (well, maybe you’re a normal person and you DON’T know) you start feeling like there’s stuff crawling on you. My arms and legs were crawling and I kept swatting myself. I decided that I couldn’t drive like this, so I pulled over. I had to face my foe.

Because I don’t kill spiders (I’ll get to that in a minute) I grabbed the only resource I had at my disposal, an empty Tupperwear container that I had from lunch. This guy was going to be my prisioner. Usually at my house what I do is trap a spider under a glass, slide a magazine under it, and throw it outside, saying, “and don’t come back!” This time I was thinking, I’m so blogging this, so I wanted to trap it and get it’s picture before I sent it on its way. But this guy was NOT having it. It was fast, and smart. It saw me coming from a mile away and darted between the dashboard and the windshield. So I shoved the tupperwear lid down into the crack, hoping to scrape it out. Nothing. Then I thought, “well, I can’t sit here forever,” so off I went. Not 2 minutes later, I spied it crawling up the passenger side window panel. Naturally, I freaked again, thinking it was going to crawl up over my head and jump on me. So I pulled over again. This time was worse. It webbed it’s way down off the window, right in front of a vent. And when I advanced, it slipped back into the vent. Bastard. So what did I do? I shut the vent. Hard. I don’t know if I squished him or not, I figured since I couldn’t see it, it was ok. Then I turned the heat on full blast and started driving. I finally made it home without incident and I haven’t seen that fucker since.

I’m not sure where my fear of spiders stems from, but I don’t kill them for this reason. Once my friend Kari and I were at the park. This was a summer evening, and we were probably just out of high school. Kari had an affinity for squishing bugs. So when we saw this huge (and this time, when I say huge, I mean HUGE, like tarantula size… maybe a little smaller) spider, she jumped at the opportunity like it was her calling from God. She stomped on that thing… and it exploded… with BABY SPIDERS. Yes, millions of baby spiders came pouring off of this thing. Just thinking of the visual make me want to vomit. When I relive that moment, it plays in slow motion… her foot coming down… me shouting, “nnooooooooo!!!” and then the babies pouring out on to the concrete. I think it was a wolf spider, because they carry their babies on their backs. If looking at that picture doesn’t make you shudder, there’s something WRONG with you.

Ok, it’s just me. I’m a freak.


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Hair Color Woes
I colored my hair last night and now it’s red. It wasn’t supposed to be red, but any time I color my hair a few shades darker than it normally is, it turns this weird reddish color. I don’t understand it. It looks good, but I really wasn’t hoping for red. I was hoping for dark golden blonde, like the box said.

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Weight
I’ve been exercising pretty consistently since the middle of April. This is the longest I’ve ever gone maintaining a routine workout. I usually get bored. But when I found out at my May appointment that I gained 13 pounds, that kind of freaked me out. 13 pounds in ONE MONTH. At the beginning of pregnancy. I was like, “holy shit, I’m going to gain 50 pounds!” Well at this months appointment, I was shocked to discover that I had only gained 2 more pounds. I feel huge. I realize that there’s good reason for me to feel huge, but ONLY 2 POUNDS? WHAT???

I guess I’ve leveled off for a little bit, but I was thinking this morning as I did my Winsor Pilates Buns and Thighs workout that if I worked out like this when I WASN’T pregnant, I’d be so freakin’ skinny. So maybe this is good training for my postpartum days while I’m sitting at home with a baby. Or I might just get really lazy then.

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Dreams
I had a dream last night about the president. We were walking with a bunch of people in the rain, and W. was right in front of me, refusing to share his umbrella with Cheney, so Cheney walked off and got under someone else’s umbrella. I was beside W. and he looked over at me and said, "Boy, I really need to do something to turn this country around." And I said, "Why don't you have a parade? Everyone loves parades. I know I sure do." He said, "That sounds like a great idea." Then we went to a Mexican mans house. The man only spoke Spanish, and he was speaking it in my dream. I asked to use his banyo, and while I was mid-pee, both my mom and dad burst into the room and held the door shut because someone was trying to get in. Then I woke up.

Explain that one.

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Have a good weekend!